The memory chips used to store data for mobile and desktop devices may soon get a significant upgrade in speed, capacity and power efficiency. Three years after its founding, a Silicon Valley startup called Crossbar has broken its silence to unveil its Resistive RAM technology and announce the successful production of a demonstration unit at a fabrication facility.
Resistive RAM, or RRAM, is intended as an alternative to NAND flash storage, which is currently used, among other technologies, to store files on mobile devices, laptops and desktop computers. Crossbar contends it can create storage chips with 20x more write performance, 20x less power consumption and 10x better endurance of present NAND chips, at half the die size.
With RRAM chips, mobile phones in a few years could store up to 1 TB of files — about 250 HD movies — and could last weeks or months between charges, according to the company.
George Minassian, CEO of Crossbar, argues that current non-volatile memory technologies are having trouble scaling to smaller manufacturing processes, making further performance improvements more difficult.